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WD1000VE External Hard Drive Not Recognized

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by batokova

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Hi, I have a Western Digital EIDE WD1000VE external hard drive and suddenly my computer stopped recognizing it - I have HP Compaq R3220 w/ Windows XP Home Edition. It either shows up as a local disk in Windows Explorer and in device manager it comes up as WDC WD10 00VE-00KWT0 USB Device, but I can't access it even though the system assigns it a letter. Sometimes the Autoplay shows up as loading, but then it disappears. I tried plugging it into different USB ports, disabling and enabling it, re-installing it through the device manager - the installation says it was completed successfully. I also went to see if the driver needed to be updated - it didn't. I also installed the WD Diagnostics and it passed the quick test, but no SMART status was available for it - instead of the green check mark it has a gray question mark. So the computer definitely sees something is plugged in, but it doesn't recognize it... It does the same thing on other computers (PCs) as well. Any suggestions? Thanks so much!

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by thmiuatga

If the drive is an internal drive installed in an external USB kit (I have 5 of them myself) you need to format the drive first. The system is not reading it because it's not formatted.

You will have to remove the drive from the kit and connect it to the IDE port of a motherboard in a desktop system or an IDE controller card.

When you do this and restart the system you're using, reboot the system using the installation disc for that drive. Make sure that you have the jumper settings for that drive set to MASTER, then you will be able to access that drive in the installation program. You'll want to set up the drive in the NTFS format and choose "additional Storage" since you are not installing an Operating System on it. Once you are done with this, reinstall the drive in the external drive kit. You'll be able to access the drive without any trouble with the laptop or any other PC with the USB connection.

Good Luck!

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